@matthey

Quote:

The full 8086 was a powerful 16 bit CPU in the early '80s. It rivaled the performance of the 68000 although the 68k ISA was cleaner, had a flat memory model instead of segmented memory and was 32 bit internally for future improvements.

I always thought the 68000 ran circles around the 8086, although I may have been brainwashed at an AUG meeting way back.

It's also my understanding that the 286 was twice as fast as the 8086 on common instructions at the same clock speed.

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

@bison

CGA demo on 8086

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y

_________________
http://lifeofliveforit.blogspot.no/
Facebook::LiveForIt Software for AmigaOS

@NutsAboutAmiga

... all that effort and... awful, just why?

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@NutsAboutAmiga

On the one hand, it's impressive that they were able to do that with CGA. On the other hand, it's still pretty bad. It's easy to see why Hercules graphics were popular in the 80s.

Plantronics (and Tandy) looked better, but it had the same 16-color palette as CGA, so it still looked like a Christmas tree. Atari ST, with a 512-color palette, was probably the bare minimum for decent graphics back in the day.

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

CGA demo on 8086 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y

The audio in that demo should be banned by the Geneva Convention and the UN Convention against Torture.

I could barely stand more than 5 seconds of it.

_________________
All the way, with 68k

@agami

I listened to it on mute the first time and thought the graphics were poor compared to the obvious effort exhorted but the sound butchery is beyond belief. Chip tunes this ain't! The NES was a musical gift to the world in comparison and I'm not a fan of that machine either!

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

bison Quote:

I always thought the 68000 ran circles around the 8086, although I may have been brainwashed at an AUG meeting way back. It's also my understanding that the 286 was twice as fast as the 8086 on common instructions at the same clock speed.

The 68000 was clearly superior in general purpose performance but the 8086 was a more specialized byte processor and also had very good code density beyond the accumulator architectures of the day. The 8086 had good performance for text when the programs were small which was common for business software at that time. The 8086 generally had better compiler support especially early. There are some compiled benchmarks where a 8086 will outperform a 68000 but the 68000 will win almost any contest with hand optimized assembly. The 68000 performance is between a 8086 and 80286 but probably closer to a 80286 if staying away from compiled benchmarks.

The following is Intel documentation of 68000, 8086, 80186, 80286 benchmarks.

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/components/intel/80186/210826_iAPX_186_286_Benchmark_Report_Oct82.pdf

The 68000 looks closest in performance to the 80186. The 8086 outperforms the 68000 in a few benchmarks but they are using compiled pascal code.

NutsAboutAmiga Quote:

CGA demo on 8086

The demo is of a 8088 which is lower performance than the 8086. I'd still rather have a C64 than an IBM PC or even XT. The IBM AT is more of an Amiga competitor where it really gets blown away.

Last edited by matthey on 14-Dec-2021 at 01:52 AM.

Friends,
do not underestimate the meek pc internal speaker.

The fact those demo rascals only used for a few bleeps and bloops doesn't mean a thing.
Lazy no-good doers.

Here's what the internal speaker was capable of doing, even on a meager 8080.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzNbGa05dfg

Now brace for some biblical reference/comparison from BigD to justify his unjustified mockery!



FROM THE DESK OF
MEGA RJ MICAL!!!

_________________
I HAVE ABS OF STEEL
--
CAN YOU SEE ME? CAN YOU HEAR ME? OK FOR WORK

MEGA_RJ_MICAL Quote:

Friends, do not underestimate the meek pc internal speaker. The fact those demo rascals only used for a few bleeps and bloops doesn't mean a thing. Lazy no-good doers.

Lazy is the Amiga programmer using the Paula DMA instead of the CPU. Start it and let it play on its own rather than constantly poking the hardware registers.

Amiga CD32 version of Pinball Fantasies
https://youtu.be/YLRD55rH4ak?t=39

Amiga CD32 version of Cannon Fodder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fl1pCPb504

The old 1985 Paula in the outdated '90s AGA was horrible!

@MEGA_RJ_MICAL

That's actually quite impressive. I am, however, struggling to come up with a Biblical reference. No prophecies have alluded to the PC speaker in the obscurest way.


@matthey

Thanks for the bit about 8086/80286 processors.

Last edited by bison on 14-Dec-2021 at 04:08 AM.
Last edited by bison on 14-Dec-2021 at 04:07 AM.

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

@matthey
Quote:

Amiga CD32 version of Pinball Fantasies https://youtu.be/YLRD55rH4ak?t=39 Amiga CD32 version of Cannon Fodder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fl1pCPb504

Ahh, music to my ears. Literally.

_________________
All the way, with 68k

@bison

Quote:

I though I would spare IBM the humiliation and not mention that.

Go ahead. Insulting Business Machines.

I wonder how the C16 compares to CGA or even EGA, which funny as it happens, could be considered the PC-Jr of the Commodore 8-bit world.

I liked it, runs quite smoothly considering the hardware and the music is cool too.

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@Hypex

Quote:

I wonder how the C16 compares to CGA or even EGA, which funny as it happens, could be considered the PC-Jr of the Commodore 8-bit world.

I would say better than CGA, but not as good as EGA. Of course an entire C16 probably cost less than an EGA board back in the day.

Quote:

15 colours in 8 luminance giving you 120 shades of colour levels plus Black. High resolution: 320 x 200 in 2 colours per 8 x 8 pixel block. No colour restriction per screen. Multicolour 160 x 200 in 4 colours per block. No colour restrictions. Text 40 x 25 text in 8x8 pixels. Sprites No hardware sprites

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_16

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

@NutsAboutAmiga

It is blast from the past.
It remind me good old times of real retro.
Times when even c64 has better graphics than pc.
It was so many years ago.
So much time passed.

@BigD A friend of mine showed off his PC versions of Bards Tale and Dungeon Master and I nearly wet myself laughing and showed him how they looked on the Amiga.
It wasn't until Wolfenstein and Doom that the PC was able to do something that the Amiga couldn't and for some reason Microprose released Amiga versions of their games that looked more like something you would see on a Sinclair Spectrum, which was all it took to finish the Amiga;s reputation as a games machine.

_________________
When in trouble, fear or doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

@Nimrod

We still had Napalm, T-Zero, a belated TFX and the unofficial release of Doom (ADoom) in the late 90s. My PC owning friends were still impressed by those!

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@bison

Quote:

I would say better than CGA, but not as good as EGA. Of course an entire C16 probably cost less than an EGA board back in the day.

So it has better resolutions. But apart from a 16 colour palette, it can also display 64 colours. That's still less than the C16 on screen palette but may have less restrictions.

The Wikipedia entry is inaccurate and me or someone should correct it.

The palette description is not correct. It has an odd palette of 121 colours, made from 16 colours of 8 shades. With 8 shades of black being black. I'm not sure why this odd arrangement was chosen, especially white being varied to create grey to black. And the black slot could be used for another colour. Likely related to C64 palette.

I think the high resolution as listed is correct. But multicolour is restricted by the space to store a background and foreground in 8 bits. With four colours total per 8x8 block the extra two colours need two preset shared colour registers.

No sprites but it did have a hardware cursor.

@agami

Particularly in the '85 and '86 years, when the A1000 was the only Amiga available. comparatively speaking the C64 was still selling in millions in those years.

Heck, the chart indicates that the C128 sold more units that all the Amigas combined.

And it was available from 1985 to 1989 or so.

matthey Quote:

Amiga CD32 version of Pinball Fantasies https://youtu.be/YLRD55rH4ak?t=39 Amiga CD32 version of Cannon Fodder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fl1pCPb504

agami Quote:

Ahh, music to my ears. Literally.

Compared to earlier Amiga music, the CD32 music is cheating. The 16 bit audio from the CD-ROM can be streamed and mixed with the Amiga Paula audio. This was the advantage of standard CD-ROM support which CBM had failed to make a standard for the Amiga despite development and cost reductions for a $15 U.S. CD-ROM drive. With CD-ROM audio, the original 1985 Paula limitations were not a major drawback despite the Amiga losing the on the fly music creation scene which started on the C64 and Amiga. The transition to the PC clone proceeded slowly due to lack of standard hardware but by 1990 the PC had a primitive tracker and by 1993 the demo "Second Reality" rivaled Amiga demos. PC clone sound cards started to have 16 bit audio and many more sound channels. The CD-ROM killed the developing scene on the PC though. There is an awesome video on the whole development on YouTube.

Tracker: The sound of 16 bit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw

The same video mentions the CD-ROM mostly killing the scene at 33:28.
https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw?t=2008

The SAGA Arne Paula replacement has 16 bit audio with 16 channels. CBM was planning for 16 bit audio (with 8 channels?) for AA+ which was behind schedule due to management incompetence so we can perhaps get an idea of where the Amiga would have been with AA+.

Vampire 4 STANDALONE 16 Bit 16 Track Pamela Audio running Milky Tracker Vamped Edition
https://youtu.be/41vHR4dhN8M?t=61

The Amiga CPU could mix (combine) channels for Paula but it was CPU intensive and the competition certainly had cards with 32 channels or more in the '90s. WinUAE can be used to play similar quality music on the Amiga.

Amiga Music: Thunder Compilation #2 (16 bit audio, 16 channels)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tNizdyx-DE

The Amiga lacks affordable hardware and standards though. These divided Amiga platforms are no more likely to rejuvenate the Amiga game, music and demo scenes than AmigaOne hardware. We only get a glimpse of what could have been done with a modernized and united Amiga platform.

Last edited by matthey on 15-Dec-2021 at 11:58 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 15-Dec-2021 at 11:56 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 15-Dec-2021 at 11:55 PM.